Chapter 16 - Part 521

Report from Chattanooga, Day One

At the Conference on Southern Literature, Chapter 16’s Maria Browning is having a fine time

By Maria Browning | April 15, 2011

April 15, 2011 Wandering around downtown Chattanooga Wednesday night, looking forward to the first day of the Conference on Southern Literature, I couldn’t resist stopping to pay my respects at the empty storefront that once housed Rock Point Books. It was a charming little independent bookstore, but its charm was not enough to save it from the downward spiral of the publishing business and the economy in general.

A Way to Break Out of Jail

In an interview in the Southern Literary Review Kate Daniels celebrates Robert Penn Warren

By Margaret Renkl | April 15, 2011

April 15, 2011 In an interview in the Southern Literary Review, Vanderbilt poet Kate Daniels explains her seemingly unlikely kinship with another great poet associated with the Vanderbilt English Department:

On the Dais

The Fellowship of Southern Writers honors Kate Daniels, Jeff Daniel Marion, Scott Russell Sanders, and Minton Sparks

By Margaret Renkl | April 14, 2011

April 14, 2011 The Fellowship of Southern Writers convenes today in Chattanooga for the sixteenth biennial Conference on Southern Literature. For three days, more than fifty members of the Fellowship will gather before a packed audience to read from their work and talk on panels about topics as diverse as writers’ efforts to preserve the Southern environment, the role of mentors in a writer’s development, and Southern politics and Southern literature. They will also give out some coveted awards, and four writers with Tennessee connections are among the honorees this week.

The Novelist as Historian

Jon Meacham introduces Shelby Foote to a new generation of Americans

By Chris Scott | April 14, 2011

April 14, 2011 Shelby Foote took twenty years to write his magnum opus, The Civil War: A Narrative, gaining worldwide fame for the accomplishment only when Ken Burns featured him in the blockbuster PBS documentary The Civil War. To reintroduce Foote and his three-volume history of war at the beginning of the war’s sesquicentennial, Jon Meacham has edited a collection of essays called American Homer: Reflections on Shelby Foote and His Classic The Civil War: A Narrative. The compilation explains how a good Southern novelist became a great historian and taught Americans to love their country’s past—even when that past wasn’t perfect.

Gardening with George (and John, and Thomas, and James)

In Founding Gardeners, Andrea Wulf gets to the roots of America’s beginning

By Chris Scott | April 14, 2011

April 14, 2011 In Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation, writer and gardening historian Andrea Wulf makes a bold claim—that understanding America’s creation requires knowing the founding fathers as gardeners. While historians may debate her thesis, it is certain that Wulf has wonderfully illuminated an often overlooked and very important aspect of the founders’ lives, providing new reasons to be inspired by them. As part of the Salon@615 series, she will discuss and sign Founding Gardeners in the courtyard of the Nashville Public Library at noon on April 20.

American Homer

For Clay Risen, Shelby Foote’s three-volume history of the Civil War is this nation’s Iliad

By Clay Risen | April 13, 2011

April 13, 2011 Like his putative Greek forerunner, Shelby Foote was not a trained historian but a master storyteller. He wrote four well-received novels before embarking on The Civil War, including Shiloh, a fictional account of the 1862 battle. Long after completing his trilogy of history books, he continued to think of himself first and foremost as a fiction writer: “I think of myself as a novelist who wrote a three-volume history of the Civil War. I don’t think it’s a novel, but I think it’s certainly by a novelist,” he said.

Driving the Tide (The After Dunkirk Series, Book 6)

By Lee Jackson
Severn River Publishing
444 pages
$19.99

“Driving the Tide is the riveting sixth installment in the After Dunkirk family saga, bringing to life the darkest pages of World War II―and the unflinching bravery of regular people who rose to the challenges of their times.”

~ the publisher